LTTE memorials herald hollowness of reconciliation

November 29, 2017, 12:00 pm

Sivajilingam celebrating Prabhakaran’s birthday

Just recently, construction workers on a work site in Hamburg, Germany, came across a buried giant Swastika from the Hitler era. Some "antiquarians" called for its reservation as an object of history. "No way", said the Mayor of Hamburg and other civic leaders concerned. This is a despicable sign that brings to memory the horrors committed by a regime of mass murderers. Immediately after the war, aided and abetted by the other Western Nations, Germany began a programme of "de-Nazification".

In France, the leaders of the Vichy regime that worked closely with the Nazis, were brought to book.

In contrast, after the end of Prabhakaran, those who collaborated with the LTTE and even acted as their political spokesmen are given a free hand to re-enact their old politics. There has been no move to bring them to judgment, while only the army is claimed to have war criminals. Individuals whose family "responsibility" was "recruiting" children by force to be sent to the front lines for certain death, today act as "elected" officials, rush to Geneva talking of human-rights abuses. Individuals who led suicide attacks on civilian targets like schools, buses, and trains are being commemorated as "heroes".

None of these fellow travelers of the old LTTE have come forward to denounce the murders of the best of the Tamil leaders, starting from Mayor Duraiappah, elected Tamil MPs, even the likes of Amirthalaingam whose own "boys" killed him, through Neelan Thiruchelvam and Lakshman Kadirgamar. Those who disagreed with the LTTE were "traitors"; the LTTE poet Kasi Anandan it was who deemed that such "traitors" should not die a natural death. It is this philosophy of blood, cyanide and hate that is being celebrated by some prominent members of the TNA, and the Northern Provincial Council. While these people have the money to build memorials for dead terrorists, they have no money to settle the IDPs who can be used as a beggar’s wound of complaint as long as they are not settled. After all, the IDPs are "low caste" people who are "disposable people" in the context of the Eelam objective – they need not be settled, but should be kept as a perennial problem.

What do the "liberal minded Tamils" say of all this? Why are the likes of Dr. Kumar David, who waxed eloquent of the technical prowess of the LTTE in making little war planes, etc., contributed to the Tamil Net, worked to elect Yahapalanaya, and is ever ready to comment on the barbarism of the Sinhala Buddhists, being silent on all this? Bishop Dulip Chikera, ever the urbane leader of civil society, who even at one time proposed to buy wine for Christian rituals from Killinochchi as a gesture of reconciliation to Prabhakaran, should surely come forward to denounce the crass act of "commemoration" of the dead LTTE terrorists, as well as their apotheosis into "heroes"?

How should we think of Thileepan? Was he not a deliberate human sacrifice carried out in front of the Nallur Temple by the dicta of the LTTE leader? There have been many "fasts unto death" in other struggles all over the world. But in the nick of time, death is averted by all civilized movements by ensuring that the fasting person is not sacrificed. But not so with Prabhakaran. When he took 300,000 Tamil people to Nandikadal as a human shield, he did not regard even one such life as valuable. It is documented that the wounded Tamils, while in retreat, were put in immobile buses and set fire by these LTTE heroes as they were considered a liability to them. Whatever the ISIS did a decade later, the LTTE "heroes" did it more ghoulishly. It is they who are being commemorated by some TNA leaders with their Faustian pact, by Jaffna-University’s servants of the devil, and all this is tacitly allowed by their political collaborators in the government. Is commemoration of evil a part of the "Sudu Nelum" ideology?

Is there no law against acts of racial incitement that will surely lead to the kinds of riots that we had in the pre-Eelam era? Perhaps that is the very objective of some TNA leaders? Then they can call foul and call for a Kosovo?

Those who attend such commemoration events are ghoulish misguided agents of the worst of the beast in man. Where are the apostles of reconciliation, those pillars of policy alternatives, well nourished on foreign dollars, and well aware of international values, who should rise to denounce such crass acts of homage to terror? Of course the diplomats are not supposed to comment on Sri Lanka's internal matters, even though they do if they can point their finger at the majority, who are labeled mere chauvinists.